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Of Birds and Men

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A Brain for Speech

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Abstract

Songbird learning has been successfully used as a model for the acquisition of human speech. However, bird brains are very different than mammalian brains, as they do not have a cerebral cortex that is characteristic of mammals. Intense debates have been produced attempting to identify homologies between avian and mammalian brains. Here I propose an evolutionary scenario to account for the diverging morphology in both animal groups. Despite gross anatomical differences, convergence between birds and mammals in network organization is notorious, and cognitive abilities of birds are comparable with those of many mammals. Likewise, the neural system for song acquisition in songbirds has been unveiled in detail, showing a noticeable parallelism with the human speech and language networks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0

  2. 2.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE4BT8QSgZk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg0AKfM8EY; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcvbgq2SSyc

  3. 3.

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2100535-genius-crows-tool-bending-behaviour-may-be-natural-to-its-kind/

  4. 4.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Drongo#p013bxk7

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  1. Department of Psychiatry, Medical School, and Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Francisco Aboitiz

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Aboitiz, F. (2017). Of Birds and Men. In: A Brain for Speech. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54060-7_9

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